


Bad Behavior

by bloodravenclaw



Category: Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy, Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Analysis, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:02:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25815490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodravenclaw/pseuds/bloodravenclaw
Summary: An examination of the circumstances under which people in Tolstoy's two major novels choose courses of action that transgress moral rules and cause destruction for themselves and others. Written in October 2019 for my Tolstoy on Page and Screen university class. I forget the grade I got on this specifically but I got an A in the class and am proud of my work. Posted without edits.
Kudos: 4





	Bad Behavior

In reading _War and Peace_ and the sections we have covered so far in _Anna Karenina,_ I have noticed a pattern: characters’ bad behavior and flouting of morality, which is usually what drives the plot so far as interpersonal relationships are concerned, tends to happen in places somewhat removed from the core areas of society. It starts at train stations, on remote roads, in the snow, or in costume. Immorality and its attendant disasters creep in at the edges. Three prominent examples of this pattern feature in the development of three doomed relationships in _War and Peace_ and _Anna Karenina:_ those between Natasha and Anatole, Nikolai and Sonya, and Anna and Vronsky.

In the case of Anna and Vronsky, they meet at Moscow’s train station, where the seed of their coming affair is planted, and Anna first develops a sense of unease regarding Vronsky’s attention. The train station is significant-- it is a liminal space, chaotic, not really Here or There, full of people coming and going. It is not its own location; instead, it is only a place between places. In this chaotic and locationless location, the usual boundaries of the acceptable and the possible can bend. We see this motif frequently in storytelling or folktales-- for example, the cemetery, the place where the barrier between the living and the dead becomes less certain, often hosts events of a supernatural nature, or else (frequently enough that it feels like a trope) illicit sexual encounters. While nothing quite so exciting happens at the Moscow station, Vronsky makes his first move towards seducing Anna, a married woman, an immoral action well outside the boundaries of socially sanctioned behavior. Anna immediately registers his interest and feels uncomfortable, especially when he makes such a show of giving a bereaved widow two hundred roubles. Anna “felt there was something in it that concerned her, and of a sort that should not have been” (73-74). She knows he wants her attention, and knows there’s an inappropriate romantic or sexual element to his interest. Their relationship grows during Anna’s visit to Moscow, especially at the ball, but these meetings are not as consequential as the next time they meet at a train station. The ball, while an event during which their attraction increases and they spend some time talking, does not move their relationship forward in the same way. It is a socially-sanctioned event, the main purpose of which seems to be friendly socializing (or, for younger characters, finding a respectable spouse in a safe and supervised way). In such a public place, an extramarital affair has much less opportunity to occur. They dance together, and some people take note, but their relations first began at the Moscow train station. Vronsky’s intentions and Anna’s feelings then become clear at their next train-station meeting. On Anna’s return trip to Petersburg, she sleeps on the train as it heads through a blizzard, and is awoken by an attendant at some small intermediate stop on the way-- another liminal space, made even more treacherous by the visibility-obscuring blizzard and Anna’s sleepiness. She steps outside for a moment and comes face to face with Vronsky appearing out of the snow like a ghost. In surprise, Anna demands to know why he is following her to Petersburg, to which he replies, “Why am I going? … You know I am going in order to be where you are … I cannot do otherwise” (103). Immediately afterwards, the wind “dumped snow from the roof of the carriage”, and “all the terror of the blizzard seemed still more beautiful to her now. He had said the very thing that her soul desired but that her reason feared. She made no reply, and he saw a struggle in her face.” (103) Hidden by the snow and at a remote train station in the middle of nowhere, Vronsky reveals the strength of his feelings and his intentions to continue pursuing her, and Anna, torn, realizes her own desire while still sensing the improper nature of his attention. They return to the train and Anna falls back asleep, and the whole exchange could almost have been a dream left far behind in the snow and quickly forgotten, except that it was not a dream, and brought nearer the destruction of Anna’s family.

Natasha’s doomed relationship with Anatole gets its start at a theater performance. At first glance, their meeting seems different from that of Anna and Vronsky-- isn’t going to the theater more like a ball than it is like an ephemeral meeting at a snowy train station? However, Natasha and Anatole’s meeting fits the same pattern. The purpose of going to a play is to lose oneself in the experience of another. People dress in costume and act out stories in order to become someone else and to cast a spell over the audience, enabling them to experience what may be far beyond their own lives. Here, too, borders become blurred-- not between Here and There, but between Self and Other. In engaging with art, especially the performing arts, one can experience another person’s love, fear, joy, and sorrow. Watching another’s story unfold allows the audience member to vicariously experience the events of the plot, to feel the characters’ emotions, and to feel his own responses of fear, pity, or catharsis. This blurring of borders, like that experienced by Anna at the train stations, enables tragedy to seep into Natasha’s life. The loosening of the restrictions of proper behavior is first exemplified through visual imagery, when Tolstoy repeatedly mentions that the women in the audience are “half-naked” or that Countess Bezukhov’s bosom is “completely exposed” (619). Clearly, the standards here have loosened in comparison to the everyday. Upon arriving, Natasha begins to feel the effects of this atmosphere, “[gliding] steadily into a state of light-headedness the like of which she hadn’t experienced for some time. She lost all sense of where she was and what was going on before her eyes … In the kind of light-headed mood she was in, everything seemed perfectly straightforward and natural” (618-619). Her dreamy state makes her an easy target for Anatole. The movie does an excellent job of presenting in a visual form Natasha’s internal state. Everything blurs together into an intoxicating mixture of light and color, with transitions between shots looking like the shattering of images by a prism and with Anatole’s gaze never far from her awareness. The atmosphere and Anatole’s charm have completely broken down her usual defenses, and it is no surprise that by the end of the evening, after Anatole has been inappropriately handsy when saying goodbye, that Natasha “[senses] with horror that there was no barrier between the two of them” (625). The erosion of the barrier between Self and Other applies not only to that between characters and audience members, but also to the barrier that ordinarily would have kept Natasha and Anatole at a safe distance.

Thirdly, Nikolai and Sonya’s relationship illustrates this pattern of disaster finding its way in at the blurred edges. The most significant episode between the two of them occurs at Christmas, when the Rostovs dress in costume to visit friends of the family. As in Anna and Vronsky’s case, the snowy weather symbolically insulates them from the rules of the outside world. And as with Natasha and Anatole, the wearing of costumes facilitates the dissolution of usual expectations, though not quite in the same way. In their Christmas mummer’s costumes, Nikolai and Sonya assume new identities, not in the indirect way of engagement with stories, but directly. In becoming new people, they move even further from the required behavior of their everyday lives, to which the inversion of their genders contributes. This departure is first revealed through the description of Sonya’s costume: hers is “the best of them all. Her moustaches and eyebrows were particularly fetching ... she was taken right out of herself in a new mood of excitement and energy. An inner voice told her that now or never her fate would be decided, and dressed like a man she seemed like a completely different person.” (575) In her new identity, assumed just for the night, she knows that something momentous will happen to her. Tolstoy further develops the sense that something special is going on with his description of their nighttime drive, when Nikolai wonders, “where are we now? … Could be anywhere. It’s somewhere new. It’s a magical place” (577). Like Anna at the snowy train station, Nikolay finds himself in some magical in-between nowhere place. He feels himself to be driving across an “enchanted plain” that “could be anywhere, and anything could be happening to us-- and whatever is happening to us is very strange and very nice” (577). The whole drive continues in this manner, with the characters traveling through a magical nowhere, while anything that might suggest to Nikolai and Sonya that their relationship might not be such a good idea resides far away, forgotten in the mundane world. Looking to Sonya, Nikolay thinks, “that Circassian with the moustaches, I don’t know who he is, but I love her” (577). He and Sonya see each other with new eyes, and in this magical snowy fairyland out of space and time, they fall even more deeply in love, and make concrete what had previously been not much more than a childhood crush. While carnivals and the like have their place (this Christmas mummer’s costume tradition sounds a lot like Halloween, and who can deny the fun and positive effects of having a designated holiday for the cathartic freeing of the less-acceptable aspects of one’s nature or playing with concepts that make us uneasy), one must be careful not to do anything that will have negative consequences once the festivities have ended, which Nikolai and Sonya did not make sure of. Though both meant well, their relationship was doomed by their consanguinity and their family’s disapproval, and in the end brought them both more sorrow than happiness.

I have brought together a few of the strongest examples of the pattern I have noticed throughout _War and Peace_ and _Anna Karenina_ , that of the events that occur at the edges when boundaries start to melt and when characters begin to lose the self, often being the driver of developments in interpersonal relationships and the bringer of misery later on. When characters find themselves in train stations or in costume or in fairyland, loosened moral expectations and inappropriate behavior may not be far off, and the consequences thereof inevitably follow and wreak havoc on the characters’ lives.


End file.
